Old One In the Matrix
by James Greensweight
Summary: A Shadowrun retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu with heavy artistic license taken.
1. Chapter 1: Family Reunion

Part I

(Family Reunion)

"Francis Thurston?" the man asking was a pudgy fellow in a white lab coat, who reeked of disinfectant, that had just emerged from the metal double doors that cut off the morgue from the antiseptic white hall in which Frank had been waiting.

Frank bristled a bit, despite knowing that the hospital's policies would have required the coroner to verify his identify before taking him into the secured section of the building. He was, after all, a doctor himself, but it didn't make it any less annoying that the man called him by his legal name, which he despised, nor did it abate the desire to point out to the man that since he was the only one waiting in the hallway, it should have been pretty obvious who he was.

"Doctor Thurston, yes," Frank answered as he stood from the bench which offered little comfort from its worn padding, and pointedly ignored the other man's extended hand as they moved together into the morgue.

"Sorry, Doctor," the man offered as they entered the main storage area and Frank felt goose bumps rise at the drop in temperature, "I was only told that a relative was flying in from Chicago for identification. I was not aware you were also medically trained. I am Doctor Blake, the coroner here at Miriam Hospital."

The main room of the morgue was lined with small metal doors, each blinking a verification that the internal temperature of the compartment was being maintained well below the zero degree mark.

In the center of the room, a single body lay on the stainless steel table, covered from head to toe by a pristine white sheet.

"We actually have enough to make the identification," the pudgy coroner offered, "Having a family member verification is just a formality. You didn't really need to come all this way."

"I know," Frank nodded. He wasn't terribly close to his uncle, so there wasn't much of an emotional connection, but something else had compelled him to come in person when the hospital had called. He couldn't put his finger on it, but the death of his uncle seemed out of place in an oddly familiar way.

He hoped he was wrong. Fifteen years working the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial, in Chicago, might have jaded his views a bit. This was Providence Rhode Island. Even though it was technically part of the greater Boston sprawl, it was part of the outlining area and it certainly was not plagued with the dark and grim violence of his own city. Even the clean conditions of the hospital, in contrast to his own place of employment with its graffiti ridden walls, served as a reminder this absolutely was not Chicago.

Still, years of treating gang injuries, and survivors of shadow ops, both on and off the books, had left Frank a bit jaded. Besides, even though the quarantine had been lifted after "Operation Extermination, it still wasn't easy getting passage in and out of Chicago. Even with his status as a physician, and extenuating circumstances for a family death, he had undergone numerous tests, both physical and metaphysical, to ensure he wasn't one of the surviving bug spirits that once infested the sprawl, before gaining the clearance to leave.

The coroner drew back the sheet to reveal the face and upper torso of Frank's uncle, George Angell, but stopped before revealing the top edge of the "Y" shaped incision he knew had been was created during the autopsy.

Additionally, Frank noted the data jack behind his uncle's right ear, a small port used to wire into the matrix. Such devices were used by criminals to hack files for profit, or sometimes just for fun, but he had a feeling his uncle only had one installed to aid in research.

He had one of his own installed when he first started as a physician. It made accessing medical journals and texts far simpler, but he rarely used it. Even though he didn't venture anywhere near the more dangerous areas of the matrix, with potentially lethal security, he had seen more than his share of the effects when a decker was brought into his emergency room after messing with something beyond his skills. The lucky ones died, the unlucky ones were reduced to a vegetative state.

"It's him," Frank nodded. His uncle would have been sixty-four on his next birthday, had he lived, but looked considerably younger due to his regular exercise habits and controlled diet.

It suddenly struck Frank what it was about all this that felt off. He had not seen his uncle since before the Chicago quarantine, but his earliest memories of the man had been of an accomplished academic and athlete. In fact, the entire reason George Angell moved out of Chicago, several years before the quarantine came down, was because he wanted to live closer to the Boston Marathon, and event he had flown out for five times prior to relocating permanently and taking a position at Brown University.

"Wait," Frank stopped Dr. Blake as the man was lifting the sheet back to cover George Angell's face, "Did you do a full tox screen?"

"Of course," came the expected answer, "His blood was clean and all of his levels were well within normal ranges, except his electrolytes were a bit erratic."

"And his calcium levels?" the coroner stared back blankly causing Frank to repeat himself, "The Calcium levels, doctor?"

"We didn't test calcium."

"I presume you still have blood samples on hand from which you can run a test?"

"We keep samples on hand for a few months, but I don't see the point..."

"Just do it," Frank instructed as he reached for a set of disposable gloves from the box nearby.

"Mister Thurston," the coroner took a tone that Frank knew all too well, having used it himself many times when dealing with bereaved family that was acting irrationally, "I understand this is a hard time for you, but I need to remind you, you are not on staff here. I assure you, that we have done due diligence in our investigation of your uncle's death. He had a heart attack. This is not uncommon for one his age."

"Does this look like a man who was prone to have a heart attack," Frank asked as he began his own physical examination of his uncle's body, "You just said that all his levels were within normal range. I presume you also mean his cholesterol?"

"Mister Thurston," the coroner protested.

"It's Doctor Thurston," Frank snapped as he pushed aside the hands of the coroner when the other man tried to stop his examination.

"Not here it isn't," the man retorted, but did not move to interfere again. Instead, the coroner strode purposefully to a phone mounted by the door, and Frank was certain he was calling for security.

A minute later, Dr. Francis Thurston found himself being escorted from the hospital by a pair of officers from their security team, but not before he had found what he was looking for.

As he walked long the street towards his late uncle's apartment, he thought about the significance of what he had found. Two, almost imperceptible, needle punctures, about an inch and a half apart on this uncle's left shoulder.

George Angell had been murdered.


	2. Chapter 2: Anthony Wilcox

Part II

(Anthony Wilcox)

Even taking on as clam a demeanor as he could when trying to explain it to the coroner and then the security officers, he knew he was being looked at as nothing more than a grieving family member who had trouble coping. He had seen so many relatives of patients who could not save hat grasped for reasons their loved ones had died, that he understood why the hospital staff was looking at him with a mixture of pity and annoyance, but it didn't make it any less aggravating, especially under the circumstances.

For one thing, he simply wasn't that emotionally attached to an uncle he hadn't seen in twenty years. For another, he had seen the evidence of foul play with his own eyes, but nobody else was willing to look.

Perhaps it was because Providence was not near the down town sprawl of Boston, where people operated more in the shadows and was instead an educational community. The corporations knew there was a need for educated workers, and had turned Providence into one-step shy of a single giant university.

Even the hospital from which he had just been escorted was, in part, and education facility. This lead him to realize why the coroner may have overlooked the needle points concealed in the depression just below his uncle's clavicle, inexperience.

Frank, on the other hand, was quite familiar with the assassination technique used by shadowrunners. Usually, it involved a person with a cybernetic hand that concealed retractable syringes in two of the fingers. The first would contain Calcium Gluconate, the second Potassium Chloride.

The two chemicals couldn't be mixed before injection, but once they were in the body they would bond to each other in a fatal reaction that stressed the heart, inducing cardiac arrest. The Calcium alone would be enough to kill, but the potassium ensure that death came quickly enough to prevent medical attention saving the victim.

The question that Frank was asking himself as he unlocked the door to his uncle's modest apartment with the key card the building manager had provided him, was; Why would someone want a professor of history killed. It wasn't like George Angell was anyone of note. His specialty was in unexplained pre-Awakening phenomenon. Who would feel the need to hire a professional assassin to kill man that spent his days lecturing on the possibility of the bigfoot being being a potential case of pre-awakening goblinization?

The apartment was small, as was typical of corporate provided housing, and well kept. It didn't take Frank long to find what he was looking for. The jack implant his uncle had told him there would be a cyberterminal nearby for accessing the matrix, and he found it sitting on a stainless steel desk alongside a pile of books.

He couldn't help but smile at the oddity of the scene when he found it. A device capable of projecting a person's mind into the matrix, where it could access nearly every piece of data ever recorded was half covered by an actual, paper and ink, bound in a cover, book.

He looked at the cover of the book before setting it aside. _Cryptozoology A to Z_ the cover read, listing the authors as Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark. A quick look at the publication date told him it had been originally released just before the turn of the century, making the book roughly seventy years old, though this was labeled as a later edition, from the 2020s, with added entries and supposedly updated accounts.

The page it had been left open on, facedown and half-covering the terminal he sought, was to an entry labeled "Dobhar-Chú", a creature that allegedly lived in the waters of Ireland, now known as Tír na nÓg, that had an illustration of a beast that looked like an enormous otter, with massive teeth.

Numerous other pages had been dog-eared by his uncle, and Frank took a casual glance through them. He didn't buy into George Angell's beliefs regarding pre-awakening magical creatures, but that didn't mean something in the books might not be a clue as to what had prompted his death.

Kraken, Lochness Monster, Lariosauro, Ogopogo, and numerous others had been marked of special note. The only common factor that Frank could find was that every entry on a marked page was aquatic.

One in particular stood out from the others, simply because Uncle George had circled the name multiple times, and written "DO?" in the margin. A humanoid frog like creature called The Loveland Frog, that was allegedly seen in Ohio from the 1950s until 2016.

The dates indicated it to be a creature reported both before and after the awakening. This was just the sort of thing his uncle looked for, creatures with supposed sightings both before and after the awakening.

Frank sat for a moment to read the entry, but quickly dismissed it as not being relevant to what he was looking for. Nobody was likely to kill over a kooky belief in frogmen. Though he remained curious about the word "DO?" scrawled on the page. The capital letters made it seem urgent, but what was it George was saying to do?

The cyberdeck was going to hold the answers, of that he was certain.

After ensuring he was well situated on the couch and wasn't going to simply fall over when his body went limp, Frank plugged the cable into the data jack behind his ear.

The feeling of jacking in was like being completely paralyzed and then tossed out of an airplane into a blinding white light. There is a monetary feeling of weightlessness, in which the stomach protests, a bit of vertigo and then, too fast to even be perceived, the person's consciousness was in the matrix where all of these feelings just vanished.

Frank looked around himself.

It seemed his uncle had opted for a basic icon interface, not the full virtual reality overlay that most went for. His files were simple icons suspended in space above a flat grid patterned floor that stretched beyond sight.

The only other feature was a glowing blue rectangle, about the size of a doorway. Frank knew that would lead him out into full matrix access, but for now all he needed were these local files saved to his uncle's personal storage area.

The benefit of being jacked in was that he could access files with mere thought, as opposed to rummaging around his uncle's apartment looking for hard copies of things he might have been working on. The drawback was that he had to know precisely what he was looking for if the interface were going to interpret his requests properly.

He didn't have much to work with, so he thought of the single word George had scribbled on the book the page.

"Do," he said, and a file floated across the empty space to hover arms length in front of him. It was a thin icon, indicating there wasn't much in it.

He raised his hand to touch the file, standard user interface for opening it, and was surprised by the sight of long coat of hair covering his arm and the back of his hands. Not just like having hairy arms, but full on fur, like a gorilla.

He looked down at his body, then slowly shook a head that was far too cumbersome to be his own. Other people decked out their interface to simulate real life, or fantasy worlds, in which they could immerse themselves. Leave it to George to go the no frills route on everything else, but still take the time to ensure his avatar was a fragging sasquatch.

A momentary side thought and the default avatar for George Angell's cyberterminal was replaced by the profile avatar stored in Frank's implanted data jack, a stylized version of his actual appearance dressed in a stylish white suit, with button up blue shirt, that he saw in a video by a 20th century musician. He had even included the white fedora, thinking the outfit just wasn't complete without it.

His hand, or rather the hand of his more personal avatar, touched the folder icon and watched it reshape itself into a calendar with his uncle's appointment schedule.

"It's a start," he shrugged, and began perusing the various items entered in the database.

He had mixed feelings about his uncle's scheduling. On the one hand, unlike the apartment itself, his calendar was thorough, and highly organized. This meant if there were something out of place Frank was pretty well guaranteed to find it documented here. On the other hand, George documented everything, and it meant he was stuck filtering through tons of entries about the schedules for the classes he taught at Brown university.

His first step was to add a filter on regularly repeated events. This took out the usual class schedule and other such mundane entries. After a set of other filters, Frank had a more manageable collection of appointments, some with file attachments that might provide further insight.

One that stood out had barely made it past the repetition filter. His uncle had been making regular visits to a man named Tony Wilcox. Evidently this Wilcox fellow had been meeting with George Angell once a week for a couple months before there was a single missed meeting, followed by a change in the day of the meetings. It was the sudden change that had allowed an otherwise regular meeting to circumvent the filter he had put in place. The odd part was that when the dates had changed, so had the meeting place. Lunch meetings had turned into hospital visits.

Frank ran a quick search for Wilcox, still limiting it to within his uncle's drive rather than going on into the matrix. That is when he found the file of George Angell's collected work, a file folder labeled with a word he couldn't quite figure out how to pronounce, 'Cult of Cthulhu'.

The sheer amount of information in the main folder was overwhelming, so he zeroed in on the specific folder titled "Dream and Creations of Anthony Wilcox". It seemed that Wilcox was an artist studying matrix sculpture at the Rhode Island School of design. Wilcox was studying to be a matrix architect, one of the people who created the virtual reality interfaces that deckers used to interact with software, stuff far more advanced than what Frank was currently using to peruse his uncle's files. Architects designed entire virtual worlds with which users could interact.

It seemed that Wilcox had created a model for a program avatar based on a nightmare he had, and it had attracted George's Angell's attention in connections with his cryptology studies. A rendering of the avatar form was kept in a sub-file, and Frank opened it without giving it much thought, and certainly without any means to prepare himself for what it held...if there was a way a person could prepare themselves for such a monstrosity.

The thing loomed over Franks own avatar. To scale it must have been ten or twelve feet tall, though such measurements meant little inside the simulated environment his consciousness currently inhabited.

It was a sickly green color, and appeared as if it would be wet to the touch, not that he had any intention of touching the scaly thing. The body was roughly humanoid, thought he proportions seemed deformed almost to the point of being inhuman, the body a bit too stocky, the limbs a bit too gangly and so forth.

From its shoulder protruded a set of wings that were too small to be of any practical use, even if they were not tattered and decayed looking, as one might expect from a bat that had been mauled by a dog.

The head of the thing looked as if someone had decapitated the original creature and plopped an octopus onto the shoulders in place of the head that should have been there, if not for the eyes. The thing's eyes were cruel. No, cruel wasn't the right word, they were beyond cruel. They were the eyes of a malevolent child that pulled the wings off flies for some sadistic sense of satisfaction, except that Frank felt as if he were the fly in question.

The worst part of the thing wasn't even the way it looked, it was the way it smelled. The stench was such that it made Frank wish the direct neural interface didn't include scent and taste. The thing reeked of decay. He could only imagine the programmer recording a decaying mound of fish left in the sun and overlaying it with a trip into the city sewers. If the neural interface were not inhibiting his body from moving where it sat on his uncle's sofa, he was certain he would have been vomiting on the carpet. As it was, his avatar dry heaved, repeatedly while not having a real stomach to empty of its contents.

He shut the program almost immediately, grateful for the thing to dissolve in front of him. As it faded, and he regained his composure, he could not help but wonder what kind of deranged mind would have created such a thing.

Another file in the Wilcox folder was labeled 'observations', and Frank tentatively opened it to find a list of recordings by his uncle, a video journal of sorts with each entry named 'AW' and the date it was recorded.

He began by opening the first file and flinched as a form took shape before him. The avatar thing he had seen before had left a mark on his mind and he doubted he ever be able to open a visual file again without dreading that thing was going to appear.

He relaxed when he was the image of his George Angell standing before him. It was an actual representation of his uncle, not the sasquatch thing Frank had found himself as when he first logged in. Evidently uncle George intended these recordings to be of a more professional nature.

"March 2nd, 2075," The image of his uncle began, reciting the date the file had been created, "I was approached yesterday by a man named Anthony Wilcox, and artist studying Matrix Architecture, who has created an abomination of a thing based on his own nightmares.

"I have attached a copy of his creation, but a warn you, it is not for the faint of heart."

"Great, NOW you warn me," Frank sighed, but he noticed the look of revulsion on his uncle's face and knew that George had been every bit as repulsed by this thing as he had been.

The recording went on to explain how Wilcox claimed to be slightly wakened in that he could sense magical forces but not actively manipulate them like a full mage. The artist had felt there was something more to his creation than just a bad dream, and he had sought Professor Angell's expertise in odd and mythological creatures to see if the thing had any roots in legends or folklore.

"I surmise the thing might be some variation of the leviathan of kraken of ancient lore. The cephalopod head certainly leans that way, but rest of the form does not. In addition, the symbols Wilcox has provided with his art seem neither Nordic, as one would expect for the Kraken, nor Semitic as would be expected for the leviathan. They seem more like something Sumerian in nature, though this is not my field of expertise. I plan to speak with a colleague in the linguistics department about it to see if I can learn more."

The first recording ended and Frank set up a chain so that as each entry finished it would begin the next. Several were minor entries about dropping off samples of writing with another professor, or Wilcox checking in with George for updates. Frank skimmed these quickly by increasing the feed speed, but slowed it down again with points of interest emerged.

"March 10th, 2075", began another entry, "Professor Williams and Professor Palsang have been of instrumental help in deciphering the symbols, though neither is fully aware of meanings or significance.

"Williams as found the symbols to be a bizarre combination of Sumerian, Acadian, and a few other ancient scripts that appear to have no other connection than in these samples. She is under the impression the text was assembled as some sort of a joke to test her skills.

"Despite her incredulity, Professor Williams provided a phonetic translation of 'Cthulhu Fhtagn'.

"I took this to Professor Palsang. It took him several days and he was only able to translate the second word. More precisely, he was able to connect it to certain words he think might be roots, but states the word "Fhtagn" is not a real word in its own right. As for the roots, they all seem to point to variations on the word 'wait', or 'lurks'. Other versions translated to words more like 'rests' or 'sleeps'.

"I think, and this is merely speculation on my part, that the other word is meant to be the thing's name. As such, the translation might be 'Cthulhu waits' or 'Cthulhu sleeps'. In either case, if this thing is more than just a figment of Mr. Wilcox's subconscious, I can only pray this thing is content to keep waiting or sleeping, or whatever it is doing."

Over the course of the posts, George had become more and more convinced that this thing, which he was now calling Cthulhu, was real, but Frank knew his uncle was prone to attributing validity to every odd creature claim that crossed his path. The mere idea that thing might be real gave Frank goose bumps...or at least it would have if his skin were more than just pixilated data at the moment.

A few entries later and Frank slowed the feed again. The look on his uncle's face was a worried one. "March 25th, 2075," the image of George Angell began, and the tone in his voice was as worried as the expression on his face, "Wilcox failed to meet with me two days ago, as per out regular appointment. I tried to contact him, but there was no answer. I found out this morning that he has been admitted to the hospital with a high fever and rambling incoherently in his sleep. The doctors cannot identify the cause.

"The problem is his ramblings are only incoherent to people who don't know what he and I have learned. The words that his doctors have attributed to as babbling sounds much like the same odd language as the script he provided when he first visited me. Indeed, he was heard to utter the words Cthulhu and Fhtagn more than once, as well as frequently repeated a new word, R'lyeh. I took a recording of his speaking while he slept and will be asking Palsang to examine it.

"The poor boy lives in a near constant state of horror from these fever dreams now. It is only when he wakes that he seems to have any semblance of peace, and even then he merely stares silently at the ceiling from his hospital bed, his energy spent in tossing and thrashing about from his nightmares.

"I can only hope that Wilcox makes a full recovery, but at this point, it is anyone's guess," George ended, and Frank could see that he had grown to like the artist enough to express an almost fatherly concern. Perhaps their shared pursuit of this Cthulhu thing had served as a bonding experience of some sort.

There were a couple more entries that followed. Mostly these exhibited George's concern regarding the health of the artist, some showed aggravation that it was taking Professor Palsang so long to provide a translation to the recordings, which he had transcribed phonetically to protect the artists anonymity and Frank could tell that his uncle was venting frustration at Wilcox's health more than at his actual colleague.

One part stood out and made Frank shiver in sympathy for Wilcox. Evidently his dreams were not of the ten foot monstrosity that Frank had seen in the other file, but of a much larger version that the young man had described during one of his fits as being like a 'walking mountain wading through towering buildings that came only to its waist'.

As if a ten-foot tall version wasn't bad enough, Wilcox was trapped in his own mind with a version of this thing that could level a city. There was nowhere to run from something like and it was no wonder George had said the man seemed more peaceful awake than asleep.

"April 2nd, 2077," began another in the long line of video journal entries with George clearly excited, "Anthony...I mean Mr. Wilcox has woken this morning. I mean truly woken. His fever is gone and, thankfully, he has no memory of the night terrors that have been plaguing him for roughly two weeks now. For my part, I have no intention of reminding him."

A few more entries followed, but mostly pertaining to Wilcox returning to a more normal state. No more dreams worth noting were mentioned, and over the course of three or four months the two seemed to slowly drift apart. It seemed George's concern for Wilcox was linked directly to the young man's connection with researching the abomination they had come to call Cthulhu.

Eventually the two parted ways with George still determined to learn more about the Cthulhu creature, and Wilcox convinced it had all just been a series of nightmares he wanted to put behind him.


	3. Chapter 3: Inspector Lagrasse

Part III

(Lagrasse)

Frank continued to examine his uncle's records and found a reference to someone named Legrasse that seemed out of place. All the entry had was the name, and a comm number, with "Cthulhu?" noted alongside it.

He jacked out of the matrix, his eyes opening on his uncle's disheveled apartment once more, and moved to couch before ordering the commlink that came standard with his datajack implant to dial the number.

It rang multiple times before a woman answered it with a, "Hello?" that sounded only in his head and held the inflections of a think Cajun accent.

"Hello, I am trying to reach a Mrs. Joan Legrasse," Frank commented into the receiver.

"You found her," the voice replied.

"My name is Frank Thurston," he continued, "I found your name in my uncle's personal effects. I was hoping you could tell me more about what he was researching before he passed. Does the word Cthulhu, mean anything to you?" He hoped he hadn't butchered the pronunciation too badly, but the only response he got was a sudden click followed by the silence of a dead line.

It seemed that Mrs. Lagrasse was not going to be of much help after all.

Frank made his way to the kitchen as he pondered his next move in understanding what might have gotten his uncle killed. He had spent quite a bit of time in the matrix, and realized he hadn't eaten since breakfast, many hours before.

In the refrigerator, he found lunchmeat, or at least a soy simulation of it, and bread. In short order, he had made himself a faux turkey sandwich, and opened a bottle of soda. He had half finished his meal when the sound of the commlink ringing in his head startled him.

"Hello?" he asked into the receiver.

"Francis Angell, right?" Came the same Cajun accented voice he heard before.

"Thurston, not Angell. George was my uncle on my mother's side," he answered, "and I generally go by Frank rather than Francis."

"Good," the voice seemed to have been satisfied by his answer in a way that made him feel as if he had just passed some sort of test, "Alright, Doctor Thurston, but before we start, I have some questions for you."

"Fair enough," Frank did not want this woman hanging up on him again so he figured it best to let her set the pace of the conversation.

The first questions were all about his background, and he realized after the first three that she was vetting him. He realized she must have run a check on him after hanging up the first time, and got the feeling she was reading information off a data display as she asked him where he went to school, how long he had been practicing medicine, and other bits of trivial information about him. This also explained how she knew he was a doctor without him having actually said anything concerning it.

"Next question," the woman continued after roughly ten minutes of grilling him on his background, "How did George die?"

"Coroner listed the cause of death as a myocardial infarction," he paused, reminding himself he was probably talking to a layman and not another medical professional, "They are saying he had a heart attack."

"You didn't answer the question," the woman stated flatly, "I asked how he died, not what the official report says."

"I think he had a heart attack," Frank answered, unwilling to expose himself to the same ridicule he has received at the coroner's office.

"We can end this conversation right now if that is what you want."

"I think his heart attack was induced chemically by an orc with a cyberware arm," Frank admitted with a sigh, "Calcium and Potassium compounds can be used to mimic a heart attack, and he had two puncture marks where they could have been delivered. I know it sounds crazy..."

Frank was abruptly cut off, "I believe you. Was it a met that got him?"

"I don't know," he answered. Though he recognized the derogatory term for a person who had gone through goblinization, the process that turned some people into non-human races, he wasn't sure who had actually killed his uncle.

"Probably a damned tusker. They have tons of tuskers," the woman grumbled, using another slur for orks and trolls. "Ok, I'm convinced you're chill. How much do you already know about my talks with George?"

"Next to nothing," Frank answered, "I found your number on his deck, along with the word Cthulhu."

There was a pause on the comm connection, then a heavy sigh, "Your uncle kept a collection of data chips separate from his deck. He felt they were more secure if they were stored somewhere without access to the matrix."

"That sensitive?" Frank asked. Sure, hacking was a common practice, and it was certainly easy enough to find a decker willing to do it.

"Without a doubt," the woman replied, "It is tapped to the bottom of his sock drawer, but before you go digging into it, I need to give you a bit of background information."

"His sock drawer?" Frank asked as he headed to the master bedroom.

There was a bit of a pause. "He and I got a bit close," the woman on the other end of the connection offered, "Nothing serious. I just came up to see him once in a while. Travel between C.A.S. and the U.C.A.S. isn't exactly easy, passports, checkpoints, and all that."

"I was merely confirming that was where you were saying," he replied, not eager to hear about his uncle's sex life. He pulled out the sock drawer, dumped its contents on the bed, and then flipped it over to see where an envelope was tapped to the bottom. "Found it," he stated as he opened the envelope to reveal a small handful of datachips.

"Those contain his more sensitive material concerning this," the woman explained, "The one marked, JL2057 is going to contain the things I gave him. It has the data feed from a case I worked in that year. What has it been now, twenty years ago? Damned I was so young back then.

"I was in my late twenties, and had just been promoted to lead my own team for N.O.P.S. a year before. In that year, I had made a name for myself as someone who got the job done quickly and quietly."

"N.O.P.S.?' Frank asked as he took the envelope of datachips back out tot h main room, "Not familiar with that."

"New Orleans Police Services Incorporated," Lagrasse explained, "The Big Easy don't contract out third party police forces like other cities.

"Anyway, as I said, I had made a reputation for being able to work discreetly, which is what most of our clients were looking for, so it wasn't a surprise when I got assigned to finding the missing daughter of a Seretech executive.

"Now you got to understand, I was up against a hard wall from the get go. Lots of people go missing around here. We have more than our share of problems with organlegging, not to mention the sextrade, and then the vamps, among others. People vanish around here and getting them back ain't easy, but when an exec is laying down that much cred, you move heaven and earth to get the job done.

"Only lead we had was that his daughter was seventeen, and had a taste for mindbenders."

Frank frowned at the words. Simsense chips were common for entertainment, and allowed the user to experience to role of the person who recorded it fist hand. Some still called it virtual reality, as a reference to the older style tech, but simsense went much further. When someone used a ship, they weren't just seeing the data recorded, they could feel the entire experience, including emotions. for the simsense user, the brain was fully tricked into thinking they were actually there, wherever the sim was programmed to tell them "there" was supposed to be.

'Mindbender' was a street term for simsense chips that had the peak controls removed, or at least relaxed to a pint that held the potential to be actively dangerous to the user. More than that, these kind of chips, also known as Better Than Life chips, or B.T.L.s were known to be highly addictive. Frank couldn't count the number of cases of users whose brains had been fried due to sensory overload that had crossed his path in the emergency room over the years.

"I started taking to some of my contacts, lower ranked dealers among the Crescent City Mafia, and found out she had been around, but that they hadn't seen her for a week. More importantly I learned that disappearances among chipheads had increased, drastically, and nobody knew why."

"You said disappearance were common in New Orleans," Frank interjected.

"Yeah, but this was different. We are talking a hundred disappearances in a week, without anyone having a clue as to why. Even if they aren't behind it, nothing on the scale of what I was hearing takes place in this city without Kozlowski's people having at least a hint of it, but my contacts were completely dry as to who was doing what with these cases.

"Believe me, if they knew, they would have told me. The only thing the missing people had in common was their mindbender habits. The people I was talking too were not the sort that took kindly to losing their regular clients, because La Dame de la Mort isn't someone you want asking you why your revenue went down. When it comes to employees, she takes the term dead weight literally."

"And nobody had been reporting these disappearances?" Frank asked as he sat on the sofa and laid out the datachips from the envelope on the coffee table.

"The exec's daughter was the only one with enough cred to make it worth looking into," Largesse answered, "All the other cases were just part of the nameless masses. Addicts and runaways who either didn't have family, or had family too poor to make it worth the N.O.P.S. investing time to follow."

There was a long pause, and when Lagrasse spoke again, Frank could hear the regret in her voice, "Broke or not, they didn't deserve what happened to them."

"What happened?" he asked.

"I finally got enough info together to connect the disappearances to some reports of odd activity out in the swamp land," she explained, "We figured it was some sort of dark ritual magic being done. That datachip your uncle kept has the footage of the raid I lead, but I have to warn you kid, what they were doing out there wasn't the standard vodou we get down here. What they were doing makes Blood magic look tame. I wouldn't go loading that chip lightly."

"I understand," Frank assured her. He had been elbow deep in a troll's guts trying to patch up wounds in the emergency room, and doubted whatever was on the chip was going to be worse than that.

"No, you don't," the woman sighed, "And you ain't going to until you see it for yerself. Just remember I warned you off doing it.

"After that raid, everything changed for me," she continued, "It was a ritual of some sort, performed by a bunch of metas, tuskers mostly. I couldn't stand to see it again, but I kept replaying the audio of the chanting that was going on. I became obsessed with it to the point that I eventually went to an international conference where some big brained experts on magic were meeting.

"Mostly it was dry lectures about how the environment has been affected since The Awakening, and other boring crap like that, but it was also where I met your uncle, among a group of others who specialized in things that are strange even by magical standards.

"I played the audio for them, but didn't show them what had taken place, in the hope that one of them could translate the chanting for me. I just wanted to know what the frag could have motivated those subhumans to do what they did.

"Well some of the folk there recognized the chanting, and had heard it from all sorts of places, all over the world, and always from extremely violent cults of nonhumans. There were cases on the Islands of Japan, even a guy from the Salish-Shidhe Council had a story about a remote tribe offshoot of the Cascade Orks.

"All of them had the same chanting, and the same phrase kept coming up in it. The Salish-Shihe professor was the only one to have found a translation for it. He said it means 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming'."

"Cthulhu," Frank repeated, "That name seems to be appearing a lot in my uncle's files."

"Yeah," Lagrasse answered slowly, "That seems to be the key to all of this. It appears to be the name of the god for this cult, but you'll find out more about that from the datachip. Even though I tell you that you shouldn't, I have little doubt you're going to load it."

"With respect," Frank protested, "We've never met. What makes you think I am going to load the chip?" Though he already knew she was right as he looked at it laying on the table among the others.

"I knew your uncle," she restated, "Met him at that conference I was just telling you about. I can hear the same curiosity in your voice that he always had in his. You're his blood, and I can already tell you got that same bullheaded determination to solve a mystery that he had."

He couldn't argue with that. After all, the entire reason he had contacted her was about trying to find answers to his uncle's death.

"Anyway," she added after a pause, "Be careful. This cult doesn't like people snooping about their business. That is what likely made an end of your uncle."

There was a click, and the line went silent.


End file.
